John Kelly Pins Civil War on ‘Lack of Ability to Compromise’

John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff, in the Oval Office last week.Credit
Tom Brenner/The New York Times

If, by appearing on Laura Ingraham’s show on Monday night, John F. Kelly was trying to do damage control after the indictments of three of President Trump’s associates earlier in the day, it did not work.

Instead, Mr. Kelly, the White House chief of staff, resurrected the debate over Confederate monuments — previously fueled by his boss, President Trump, over the summer — and the Confederacy itself. He called Robert E. Lee “an honorable man who gave up his country to fight for his state,” said that “men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand,” and argued that “the lack of ability to compromise caused the Civil War.”

Christina Wilkie, a reporter for CNBC, used Twitter to live-blog Monday’s interview, on the Fox News program “The Ingraham Angle.” Her tweet quoting Mr. Kelly’s “lack of ability to compromise” statement spread quickly.

Wow. Gen. John Kelly just said “the lack of ability to compromise led to the Civil War.” Compromise on what, exactly?

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Christina Wilkie (@christinawilkie)
Oct. 31, 2017

The reaction was swift and unforgiving, with many commenters ridiculing Mr. Kelly for suggesting that slavery was an issue on which a compromise could or should have been reached.

Within less than two hours, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s daughter Bernice King had weighed in on Mr. Kelly’s description of Robert E. Lee as “honorable,” criticizing him for making “fighting to maintain slavery sound courageous.”

Other people referred disapprovingly to Mr. Kelly’s reputation as a voice of reason and discipline within the Trump administration: the “adult in the room”; the person keeping, or at least trying to keep, Mr. Trump under control.

Please stop referring to John Kelly as one of the “adults.” https://t.co/lDLA47pQFB

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Ankit Panda (@nktpnd)
Oct. 31, 2017

Kelly is not a savior or hostage. This is John Kelly. Always has been.Too many got blinded by the uniform. https://t.co/HHEn1OqrTT

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Juliette Kayyem (@juliettekayyem)
Oct. 31, 2017

Anybody that says John Kelly is the moral consciousness of the White House is gravely mistaken. John Kelly is the swamp. Fin.

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Shree ✊❤️ (@shreec)
Oct. 31, 2017

And many pointed out that, in fact, many attempts were made to avert the Civil War through compromise — that is, by agreeing to allow slavery in some places.

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The Missouri Compromise, in 1820, admitted Missouri to the union as a slave state; in exchange, it admitted Maine as a free state and barred slavery in most parts of the Louisiana Purchase territory north of a specified latitude. The Compromise of 1850 eliminated the slave trade from Washington, D.C., but also required citizens of free states to aid in the capture of fugitive slaves. The Kansas-Nebraska Act, which replaced the Missouri Compromise in 1854, let citizens of Kansas and Nebraska decide whether to allow slavery.

And, of course, there was the compromise that aided the very passage of the Constitution: the Three-Fifths Compromise, which counted slaves as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of congressional districting.